when the tempest is raging and the lives of men at sea are threatened with being the prey of the angry elements of nature, agnostics, atheists and pious people alike, in hope of a calm, pray the Master to command the billows saying, Peace be still. Men pray to be healed from sickness when doctors fail, hoping that death in his approach may be turned back. Saints close their eyes in death with the assurance that their intuitions for everlasting life will yet be realized even beyond the silent tomb. Faith is the confidence and power given to men by quickened spiritual life. Take the doctrine of faith out of the Bible and it is reduced to a treatise on morality. On a certain occasion, the disciples were not able to cast an evil spirit out of a young man, but when Jesus came, he immediately cast it out. That the disciples could not cast it out, was no evidence that Jesus could not, nor that he did not cast it out. Jesus reproved them saying, 120 faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you, how long shall I suffer you? Ye could not cast him out because of unbelief; for verily I say unto you, if ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove, and nothing shall be impossible unto you. Howbeit, this kind goeth not out but by prayer. Speaking of the time when his disciples should become as living branches of his life, Jesus said, 18 Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father being in my nature, he will give it you. 14 All things are possible to him that believeth. The greatest supernatural power ever exerted, was that a dead man rose from the tomb to life again, and that not mere "Math. 17:17. "John 15:16. "Mark 9:22. ly to a natural body, but in a glorified body over which death had no power. The event is important to us beyond all else because that in so doing he wrought out our salvation, i. e., the salvation which God designs for men. 15If we be free from sin with Christ, we shall also live with him; who being raised from the dead dieth no more, for death has no dominion over him. As Jesus is our perfect example while he was in the flesh, so he is our perfect pattern when in his glorified body of what the race of men shall be in God's new creation. And so it is written, 16The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. For as in Adam all are dying so in Christ shall all be made alive. The glory at the second coming of Jesus Christ, establishing the creature in divine life, is mightier than any thing that has yet been, and beyond all human natural conceptions. The center of this mightiest manifestation of divine power will be he who subdued sin in his own flesh by the abundance of divine life in him, so that from the depths of death unassisted, he rose into newness of life. 17We look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus, who shall change our vile bodies, that they may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the workings whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself. When Jesus rose from the tomb, the saints sleeping in their graves about Jerusalem, rose also and went into the holy city. This was but an earnest of what shall be. 18He shall appear the second time without sin unto salvation. When born into the world, he was in a natural body, but when he returns, he will take up 16Rom. 6:9. 161 Cor. 15:45-22. his glorified body. At his resurrection the generation was in rejection of him, but at this great day of his power, the generation living shall be willing; then he will transfigure that generation into glorified incorruptible bodies, but those who are alive at his coming, shall not prevent those who are asleep in death. 19 Brethren I would not have you ignorant concerning them who are asleep, nor sorrow as those who have no hope, for Jehovah himself shall descend with a shout, and the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of God, and the dead shall arise, and they that are alive shall be changed, 20in a moment in the twinkling of an eye into his likeness, into glorified bodies over which death shall have no power. The prerogative of glorified men will be to quicken nature into the love and power of divine life. Personifying the creature, Paul wrote declaring 21that it was in sin not by the election of its own choice, but that it was subjected in bondage travailing in pain together with us, awaiting to be delivered from its corruption of death into the glorious liberty of the children of God when we come into the redemption of our bodies. The debt that men owe the suffering brute creation should be discharged at once by nature's redemption into joy and life. The impulses, of kindness toward dumb animals, budding in every kind human heart are embryotic quickenings of the final deliverance of the creature. God has committed unto us earthen vessels the reconciliation of the world unto him and his righteousness. 22God commands men everywhere to repent, because he has determined there shall be a "2 Thes. 4:13-15-16. day in which he will judge the world into righteousness, whereof he has given assurance to all men, in that he raised Jesus from the dead. Under high inspiration Moses stood on Pisgah's top and viewed the land of Promise on which his feet had never trod. But in greater sublimity the vision is set before us of being changed in a moment into glorified bodies above all sorrow and death, while the saints of all generations shall be rising into newness of life and the earth eternally established in Edenic bliss through the dominion of the divine life in men with Jesus as the captain of our great salvation. H CHAPTER III MAN UMANITY is divine life enthroned in animal bodies. The purpose of the Lord God in making man was that through men he might complete, or in other words sanctify that which he had made. Man, God's last work, is his greatest not merely because the bodies of men are the finest natural organisms, but Jehovah's dwelling place on earth is in them. Men are living life, souls, divine life in naturally living, physical bodies. This wedlock of the divinity with the creature was consummated in Eden by band never to be broken, but rested on the absolute dominion of his spirit over the creature. In our spiritual nature are the springs of all our moral emotions; their association quickens the natural intellect to understanding with power to distinguish truth from falsehood, and adapt means to ends. Its instinctive impulses are in intelligent intuitions as the immediate voice of God. As the divinity in men is holy, so is the scope of revelations and their strength of supernatural powers,-called faith. Natural life is not real life, in self-subsisting entities, but vitalized forces individualized by the organisms in which it appears. The divine life in each man is an individual, whether in the body or out of the body. It is real life, the same as God's life, a spirit. God is the great spirit, the fountain of all that is, almighty by reason of the holiness of his love. The strength of our divine life is as we are in God's perfect love. Our dominion over the creature is as we are holy. "The 'Prov. 20:27; Job. 32:8. |